Happiness, A billion dollar business model

When we are talking about the workplace Happiness, the book which perhaps stands first on the list is Delivering Happiness. The entrepreneur turned author Tony Hsieh (Pronounced “Shay”), who sold his business Zappos.com to Amazon for about a billion US $, is so much so into spreading happiness that he is now on a mission to spread happiness world over. He is propagating making happiness a business model.

The 10 core values the company followed are as under and worth following by every entrepreneur.

Deliver WOW! through Service

Embrace and Drive Change

Create Fun and a Little Weirdness

Be adventurous, creative and Open minded

Pursue Growth & Learning

Build open and honest relationships with Communication

Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit

Do more with Less

Be Passionate and Determined

Be Humble

The book details the Journey of the Tony as an entrepreneur, his journey of making Zappos the company it had become. The robust and powerful Happiness culture, he could instil and lived by.

Some of his business practices and thinking they followed are worth emulating;

They paid US $ 2000 to a new employee to quit.

Make customer service responsibility of the entire company, not just a department.

Focus on company culture number 1 priority.

Seek to change the world.

Apply research from the science of Happiness to running a business.

Some of the interview questions at Zappos:

Give me an example from your previous jobs where you have to think and act outside the box.

What was the best mistake you made on the job? Why was it the best?

Tell me about a time you recognised a problem/area to improve that was outside of your job duties and solved without being asked to. What was it? How did you do it?

You will find all these innovative culture building journeys they took to create Happiness as a business model.

The book was published in 2010 when I first started blogging on another platform. I have written about this book multiple times. The core value the company had created perhaps could be the reason the company was sold to the Amazon for about a billion US $.

At the end two questions the author asks every reader:

Are you working toward maximising your happiness each day?

What is the net effect of your existence on the total amount of happiness in the world?

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an employee or even a politician, I think these are the questions for everyone.

“Companies with a higher sense of purpose outperform other by 400%.” Tony Hsieh.